Many foreign companies with interests in Catalonia reached agreement to boycott the republican economy, he explained. The directors of the Bank of Spain were in the nationalist zone and, naturally, they used their influence abroad to ensure that international capital sabotaged the collectivized economy. ‘We found that the few exports we could make were embargoed as soon as they arrived at foreign ports.’
To avoid undue trouble, the Economics Council decided that firms with foreign capital which, in principle, fell under the collectivization decree would be collectivized only if the workers in the firm themselves agreed to it. Some twenty foreign companies were thus not collectivized. But even when they were, the subsequent offer to ‘de-collectivize’ an enterprise would not necessarily satisfy foreign owners, as Joan FERRER, secretary of the CNT commercial employees’ union, discovered.
He had been asked by the potash miners of Sallent, who had collectivized their Franco-Belgian company, to become the collective’s administrator. Potash was an important Catalan export, 165,000 tons having been produced in 1935. Although the foreign technicians and engineers had disappeared, the mines were rapidly got working again. Then came the task of finding markets. One week’s production satisfied the annual domestic demand; export markets were vital. Spain at that time had a quota within an international cartel, and through the Generalitat’s good offices, the collective was soon able to find foreign buyers, most of them in Asia. As the collectivization decree had legalized Catalan collectives, there appeared to FERRER no reason why potash should not be exported.
—But as soon as our freighters reached the high seas, they were seized by the Non-Intervention committee forces and the cargo embargoed on the orders of the original owners. We tried getting freighters out under different flags, but it made no difference. After this had happened about a dozen times, we took the case to the International Court in The Hague. It found against us, at the beginning of 1937, for one reason and one alone: the collectivization decree was a regional, not a national law …
Before the hearings, he and other members of the collective made several trips to Valencia to put their case to Negrín, then finance minister in the central government.
—He refused to recognize the collectivization decree. He, and the majority of the central government along with him, were determined not to accept it, nor allow the CNT in particular to control any part of the economy. We explained that there was a difference between a foreign-owned factory, built with foreign capital, and a mining concession. Throughout the world, the sub-soil is state property, and mining companies only hold concessions from the state for a fixed number of years to exploit the mineral resources: they do not own the sub-soil. We attempted to persuade him that the concession be withdrawn from the foreign holders and made over to the collective, against state compensation for the loss of the concessionary rights. Negrín refused even this, the only legal way out. He would have nothing to do with Catalan collectivization …2
Having lost their case, they decided to approach the concession owners, Potasas Ibéricas, the Franco-Belgian company. The important thing, in FERRER’S view, was to keep the 700 miners at work and, by exporting, to earn much-needed foreign currency for the war effort. Accompanied by two miners’ delegates and a Generalitat representative, he went to Paris to negotiate with the owners.
—I had to do all the talking since the company chairman spoke French, and I was the only one on our side with some command of the language. Our proposal was simple: the company should resume control of the mines and run them as before with only two conditions: the Works Council should continue in existence, and a number of improved working conditions be recognized. The company had been particularly exploitative before the war. In effect, we were offering to ‘de-collectivize’ the mines and to allow the company to make and retain its profits as before.
They categorically refused to listen to our proposals. They said – literally – that they would prefer to lose two, three or four years’ Spanish production, knowing that sooner or later they would re-assume control. ‘You will be swept away, and the mines will be ours again,’ they said. We broke off relations and returned to Barcelona …
At the anecdotal level, one event impressed FERRER. At the end, the chairman took his leave of the delegation in perfect Spanish. Throughout, he had spoken only in French, even though he saw that FERRER was not entirely fluent. Moreover, FERRER had to translate for his mining companions; their answers were pretty rough, and included some harsh language for the chairman. The latter, who for three days of negotiations had retained an impassive exterior, revealed at the end that he had understood everything.
—And not only that: the company was perfectly informed of our movements. We had arrived two days before the talks started, and the chairman, during one of the intervals, had told me exactly what we had been doing. Their information service out of Catalonia was excellent; they knew each time a ship loaded with potash was preparing to sail. I never found out how they organized it, but I suppose it must have been one of the technicians …
The mines had to close. The miners were sent by the Generalitat to construct roads. Not a gram of potash was mined from Sallent thereafter throughout the war.
*
Finally, a special tribunal within the Catalan Appeals Court was set up by the Generalitat finance councillor, Josep Tarradellas, of the Esquerra, in the second half of 1938, to hear foreign claims. This, in the view of Joan GRIJALBO, UGT representative on the Economics Council, might well have been a double-edged instrument as far as collectivization was concerned.
—As it happened, the tribunal never operated fully. But if it had, a demand for compensation could have raised the constitutionality of the collectivization decree – which might have been declared unconstitutional. We considered this tribunal a cover-up to ward off foreign capital; but it was really an attempt by the Esquerra to create the possibility of reversing the revolution in Catalonia …
B. Non-libertarian collectivization
While the PSUC’s view of the Catalan revolution was summed up by its secretary-general, Joan Comorera, in March 1937, as ‘seven months of grave errors, adventures, lamentable and dangerous experiments … which have ended as all such experiments inevitably do’,3 the PSUC did not propose to abolish collectivization. Indeed, a number of UGT collectives existed; and few, if any, large properties appear to have been returned to their bourgeois owners. In contradistinction to the PCE, which stood for the nationalization of large industry, the PSUC, faced still with a militant CNT working class, attempted rather to centralize the collectives under Generalitat (or PSUC) control from June 1937, when Comorera became economics councillor. In this, he was much aided by the fact that many collectives had mortgaged themselves to the Generalitat’s ‘pawn bank’ to pay their workers’ wages.4 In the course of this centralization, Comorera inevitably modified many essential aspects of the collectivization decree, including the role of the Economics Council, which was turned from an executive into an advisory organ. Such modifications could have paved the way for a later move from centralization to nationalization. The latter was, in any case, to a large extent achieved in August 1938, when the central government took over the Catalan war industries, which included not only engineering and chemical plants, but also cloth and tanning factories. In the last months of the war, partly because of foreign capital’s and central government’s hostility to Catalan collectivization, PSUC proposals were made in support of the petty bourgeoisie’s determination to transform collectives into cooperatives.5 But by this time, the collectives were in sharp decline, and the war appeared unlikely to last much longer.
The Catalan UGT was not opposed to collectivization; indeed, it advocated extending the system to the whole of Spain. But it was – like its political counterpart, the PSUC – resolutely opposed to trade union (or autonomous working-class) power.
The experiences of a PSUC worker in a UGT-led collective reveal some of the complexities of the problem Antonio
RIBAS worked in the maintenance section of an enterprise manufacturing oxy-acetylene gas, vital for the engineering industry and the war effort. His plant had eighty workers only, but the company had plants in Berga (Catalonia) and Valencia (as well as in other towns which were now in the nationalist zone). The two Catalan plants together numbered more than 100 workers, and were thus subject to collectivization under the decree. Until the latter came into force, the plant was not collectivized.
—It would have weighed on our consciences to have taken over the firm just like that. The management hadn’t treated us badly in the past. Moreover, none of the plant managers had fled Barcelona after 19 July. Our reluctance didn’t stem from the fact that the UGT was the majority union – the UGT wasn’t opposed to collectivization – but it didn’t believe there was any great hurry about it. We expected the war to end fairly soon in our favour, and we thought that we should wait until victory to lay the basis of the future economic regime, otherwise it was bound to be a haphazard affair …
He realized as soon as he saw the figures in the company accounts, ‘and my head began to spin’, that to run the plant it was necessary to retain the old managers who knew the company’s business. ‘I knew I wouldn’t personally be capable of running the enterprise, and I think most of the workers felt like that.’ But he was all in favour of a workers’ control committee, as were the other workers. They liked the idea of participating in the plant’s running.
—They would come and say, ‘Look, why don’t we do this, why don’t we try that?’ They had ideas about what should be done, how things could be improved …
Participation was one thing: full-scale collectivization another. He believed the workers weren’t prepared for the latter. Too much time and energy was spent in Catalonia on collectivizing and not enough on the necessary groundwork to ensure the experiment’s success. All energies had to be bent first to winning the war.
When they were obliged to collectivize under the decree, they formed one collective of the three plants.
—The most immediate problem of collectivization was that each factory thought of itself as an independent unit. We wanted to avoid that. If the workers in the Berga plant, where they produced carbide, were autonomous, they might start to do business on their own …
Three workers from each plant, an accountant and the plant managers formed the works council. While the workers were in an indisputable majority, they left technical matters as a rule in the hands of the former management. Work conditions were a different matter, however. The works council met once a week, the representatives from Valencia and Berga travelling to Barcelona. The nine worker-members, who included two CNT members, continued to work at their normal jobs when there were no meetings.
—Although there were one or two cases of workers who thought that the new situation meant they could do what they wanted, the majority reacted well, understanding from the start that it was necessary to work hard. In fact, an intensive work rhythm had always existed in the plant, but we worked even harder now, for we imagined that when the war ended in a republican victory, the gains we had made would be consolidated …
The collective made no profits, as far as he knew. But none of the work force went hungry either. The collective set up its own store and had a lorry which went round the countryside collecting food. The collective negotiated direct exchanges of carbide for olive oil. If it had a surplus of oil, it would exchange it for soap, and some of the latter would be used in barter with peasants for rabbit and kid meat. ‘We ran our own economy, you might say; a small one, but our own …’
*
The polemic about the Aragonese collectives sometimes obscures the extent of the rural collectivization movement in other regions, and the degree to which the UGT participated in, or initiated, collectives which differed little in some respects from those of the anarcho-syndicalists.
One such was in the village of Cardenete, with a population of under 2,000, in the province of Cuenca. It was started on the initiative of the thirty-four-year-old socialist mayor, José MILLAN, who had read books on the Soviet experience, as well as books by Joaquín Costa, the Spanish social reformer and polymath. Son of a medium-holding peasant in a village dominated by large landholdings which, in some cases, included as much as 1,000 hectares of hill and mountain land rich in pine forests, he had been moved in his youth by his father’s account of how all the forests, the village’s two olive mills and two bakeries had been communally owned until taken over by feudal landlords. He came to believe that collectivization, which would make possible mechanization, was the only answer to the agrarian problem.
A brief demonstration of force by local right-wing landlords on 19 July subsided rapidly when it became apparent that Madrid had not risen. But four days later, when CNT militiamen came from Cuenca to collect arms in the village they were met by fire and their leader was mortally wounded. More militia arrived and the right-wingers surrendered: thirty-eight of them were taken to Cuenca and approximately a dozen were shot. This was to have an important effect because, with the exception of two brothers, all the large landlords had either fled or been taken by the militia.
MILLAN sent trustworthy labourers to look after their livestock; the harvest continued to be brought in by hired hands.
—Nothing much changed, in fact. The day-labourers simply went on doing what they would have done anyway. These landlords had never worked on their land. As it was harvested, the grain was stored in their houses …
Founder of the UGT locally, and a moderate socialist, MILLAN had been swept aside, his power as mayor reduced to nothing, by the revolutionary village committee made up of leading UGT members. (The CNT did not exist in the village pre-war.) In September 1936, the communist agricultural minister’s decree appointing mayors as the local delegates of the Agrarian Reform Institute to take charge of all abandoned farms, gave him some renewed administrative power. It was then that he began to think that what once had belonged to the village, and was now in the hands of four or five large landowners, could be restored to the villagers ‘so that they could again be free’.
—We had heard that collectives were being set up in other places, although not in Cuenca province which was one of the most reactionary in Spain. Most of the landlords had not risen with the military and, camouflaging themselves as best they could, remained in possession of their lands. But things had turned out differently in my village. The landowners’ farms, which I had to administer, could form the basis of a collective. I knew the agrarian reform delegate in Cuenca, and I went to see him. He said it was an excellent idea, and so we simply went ahead. We had no proper legal basis for doing so …
The collective was established in January 1937. Of the 160 villagers who joined, the great majority were landless labourers; only about twenty smallholders joined – about 5 per cent of the village total. They put in their land, livestock, tools, etc., but not their private savings. Including families, some 500 people, or just over one quarter of the village, were in the collective, which farmed nearly 300 hectares of arable land and several thousand hectares of mountain and woodland. The founding capital was the land, the grain produced the previous harvest and the seizure of two shops belonging to the rich who had fled. The latter had fairly extensive stocks of clothes and food, as well as cash reserves.
Money was abolished as currency within the collective, membership of which was entirely voluntary. MILLAN, who put in his olive mill, grocer’s shop and his father’s 25 hectares of land, became the collective’s assistant secretary.
—Abolishing money caused some complications, but not that many. It prevented the individual collectivist from misusing the product of his labour on unnecessary things. In the collective stores, with his family ration card, he could get all the vital necessities that he and his family required. And that was his major wish at the time: to have enough for him and his family to eat. Later, had the experiment continued, other needs, new aspirations would have arisen …
To
draw his rations, the collectivist had to show that he had fulfilled his tasks as a producer: the foreman of each work group stamped his card at the end of the day with the single word ‘trabajó’ – he worked.
The collective grew everything that the people needed in the way of food. It was able to fatten up at least 120 pigs in the collective’s styes, for rearing a pig was the basis of peasant domestic economy at the time.
—People’s tastes weren’t exotic, the peasantry was used to a simple, hard life. They preferred what was locally grown. There were no food shortages – indeed, there was always a surplus which mainly we sold, although occasionally we exchanged produce directly with a neighbouring village. This was something that had been done in the past, privately, and the collective continued the practice. In fact, the collective was like a big household, a large family …
A portion of the money received from the sale of the collective’s produce was distributed to the collectivists; the remainder was reserved in a fund to permit the collective to purchase agricultural machinery in due course. In the first instance, a flour mill was built; agricultural machinery was unavailable – ‘in fact barely known in these parts then’.
—The money distributions were simply to allow the collectivists to have some small reserves to satisfy their individual whims. It was my hope that in the end, once the collective had raised a permanent fund, we could distribute all the surplus among the collectivists. But, of course, the experiment didn’t continue long enough for that.
We were able to sell all that we produced; we didn’t have to send supplies to the front. Occasionally, militiamen would come round and ask for produce, but we never had to deliver a regular quota. In fact, as the collective had money, it led a fairly autonomous existence. Governmental authority barely reached us; official organisms functioned, but in a way that hardly led to their presence being felt. We carried on as we thought best …
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